Rarely in recent times can the thought of a Tim Burton movie have excited such a stir – the furore surrounding its rapid-fire DVD release elevating the all-new Alice in Wonderland from lavish merchandise shifter to the film on which rests the very future of cinema. But I can't help wondering if the debate over 12 or 17-week windows has obscured a more essential point – that being how much genuine enthusiasm can really be mustered up for seeing it at all. (And no, not even Xan Brooks's rave can do it for me this time).

Because it's one thing for a studio to take a project and market it with such frenzied hyperbole that for a week or two seeing it becomes all but obligatory for anyone wanting to remain a la mode. It's quite another for film-goers to convince ourselves we need to see that same project through an increasingly forlorn belief in its director as a still-vital and relevant force. Whatever the implications of Burton's Alice may be for exhibitors and all that newly-installed 3D technology, the nuts-and-bolts issue here is surely the length of time any once-great film-maker is given in the cinephile heart purely on the basis of dusty triumphs a decade or more in the past.

And I know there are those who may feel passionately about Burton's recent movies, but is the world really so hard up for set-dressed flights of Gorey-esque fancy that we're rewriting history to forget 2005's drably gleaming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory retread? Or that his very finest moments in recent years could best be described as satisfactory (Corpse Bride) or efficient (Sweeney Todd)? And bear in mind that after them we're into Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes and, oh God poke my eyes out with a fantastical curlicued kebab skewer if I ever have to witness it again, Big Fish.

For the record: I'll always be fond of Tim Burton. I see no shame in confessing that at least one scene in Edward Scissorhands makes me weep like a child just told there's no Santa Claus, and that Pee Wee's Big Adventure was a worryingly formative personal influence. But maybe that's the problem – that such a chunk of our collective attention is still dominated by directors of whose greatest films we have golden memories long, long after they turned to much less interesting business. So we're left like abandoned lovers, showing up in the old haunts over and again in the hope that this time they'll have rediscovered their mojo, convincing ourselves their latest lacklustre carry-on is just another aberration, writing off the years until you realise that, in the case of Burton, the last time they truly rocked your world, Robson and Jerome were No 1 and were being listened to on Cassingle.

It's not just Burton. There is of course an even more striking example of the same malaise in Martin Scorsese, whose lengthy thriller Shutter Island stars, as is now customary, Leonardo DiCaprio in what Salon calls his "boiled" mode, and has been pulling in vast quantities of US box-office dollar. A nice late-career guarantee of job security for a director famous for his obsessive pleasure in making films – but there's a difference between acknowledging a film-maker as capable of drawing audiences, and seeing them as a genuine player in world cinema. We don't, after all, afford that to Michael Bay or Todd Phillips – and if it seems like a leap from those names to Scorsese, then it's a no-greater one than that between the Scorsese who made The Departed and the director of Raging Bull and After Hours (who was, again for the record, a phenomenon).

Two extravagantly gifted film-makers whose gothic whimsy (Burton) and grand set pieces (Scorsese) have become brands for hire, both men seem to have made almost identical Faustian pacts with the mainstream by submerging their talents in a string of adaptations and remakes at once overblown and oddly empty, packed with ho-hum spectacle but not much else. So as we take our place in the cinema queue in the weeks ahead, we're left with a choice of two variations of the same basic flavour. Either way what we're paying to see is a ghost story – the promise of a spectral glimpse of the directors who so wowed us way back when. But while amazing things can be done with CGI, I'm just not sure they're there anymore.